Hardworlding 101

“What do you mean?” Gradie asked.

“How did you get here today?” said Michael. “Walk me back from the phone call. What happened before that?”

“I was at my apartment. I called in to work,”

“What about yesterday?”

Yesterday felt like another world. The entire day seemed like the archetype of thousands before it. He could slide it into place anywhere in the last three years and watch it disappear like a drop of water in a pool. He tried to describe it.

“I went to work, came home—”

“Did you?” Michael said. The team smiled and sighed.

“No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t really me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I remember my real life.” It was hazy, distant, and the distance was terrifying.

“You remember this one too,” Michael said. “That’s why you’re able to tell me what you did yesterday.”

“What is your point?”

“I want you to be honest about what you believe, right now.”

He wanted to say that he believed, in the Otherworld, in that other life. But he didn’t. Once again, his memories were stronger than the dreams.

“This is all in my head.”

“As if your mind could contain me,” said Philip. “Fuck you kid. You’re in my dream.”

“It’s normal to doubt, Gradie.” Michael raised his voice over Philip’s. “Especially for someone as new as you. But you need to be mindful of where your head is at, or it will run away from you.”

Michael was, once again, a beacon of stability in a swirl of confusion. His voice, though now pinned in place by reality, held the same force it had in the Otherworld, and that familiarity gave Gradie something to hold on to while another him tugged and whispered at the back of his mind.

“With time, it will become easier,” Michael said. “As your Spirit develops, you’ll be able to change things about your self, and the Hardworlds.”

Gradie felt goosebumps rise on his arm. Here we go. This is what he was here for.

“So, I’ll be able to affect the Hardworlds like the Otherworld?” He imagined being able to summon a pistol at will. The idea seemed ridiculous, and died in the unwavering realness of the world around him.

“No,” said Michael. “The Hardworlds operate on the laws of the Real, and pushing outcomes is always exponentially harder than pushing memory.”

Michael had started speaking another language again, and Gradie stared at him.

“Pushing what?”

“Fresh as a fucking daisy,” Luke said. Philip scowled at Gradie like he was getting scammed. Michael looked around, trying to decide something.

“What’s on Sam’s cup?” he said.

“What?”

“I saw you looking at it earlier. Look again.”

Gradie looked over, deciding not to tell Michael it wasn’t the mug he had been looking at. There was a cat on the mug, surrounded by motifs of yarn, mice, and fish bones.

“What about it?”

“Was it always like that?”

Gradie saw the cup flash in his mind with a pattern of cats of various colors, then vanish. The cup in her hand became the only one in his memory.

“No,” he said, barely a whisper. Michael smiled and started to talk, but Gradie interrupted.

“Holy shit. It’s like the Mandala effect.”

“The what?” said Lindsey. Gradie turned red and clenched his jaw, but Lindsey’s look demanded an explanation.

“The Mandala effect. It’s this, like, meme superstition, where the Berenstein bears are called Berenstain now, supposedly because we’re in an alternate universe…”

He trailed off in embarrassment. Philip stared at him, opened mouthed. Sam giggled into her coffee. Michael let only a thin smile loose across his face, but Luke had been laughing since Gradie mentioned the bears and hadn’t stopped.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Yeah, bro. That’s it. That’s exactly what we do here. Fuck up your childhood books and shit.”

“What did you call it?” Lindsey said.

“The Mandala effect, like a—”

“Mandala effect?” She emphasized the second ‘a’.

“Yea, like those repeating pattern things, because of the alternate universes.”

“No, it’s the Mandela effect, like Nelson Mandela?”

“What?”

“It’s the Mandela effect,” EP said, like she was telling Gradie what time it was.

“Am I needed for this deep investigation, or can I—” Philip said. Lindsey spoke over him.

“Nelson Mandela, the South African leader?”

“Yea, I know who that is,” Gradie said coolly.

“Okay, well, the effect is named after him because people thought he died in the nineties. That’s all that is. People misremembering things, but thinking their memories are infallible.”

Gradie laughed.

“But you literally jump through universes, right?”

“That’s not how it works,” she snapped.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been doing this for years, Mr. first day.”

Gradie took another drink.

“Getting back on subject—” Michael said wearily. “How was I able to change the cup?”

“You imagined it differently,” Gradie said.

“No. I remembered it differently.”

Gradie rolled his eyes.

“So, you imagined that you remembered it differently then.”

“Yeah, get out of that one Michael!” Luke laughed.

“Despite your sarcasm, they are two different things here, Gradie. When I want to change how things are, I rely on memory. When I want to decide how they will be, I rely on visualization.”

“So, you remembered the cup having a different pattern, and your memory was stronger than mine, so it overpowered mine basically, right?” Gradie thought of the two figures in Michael’s story, morphing a chair with thought.

“What do you mean stronger?”

“You believed it more than me.” Gradie shifted in his seat. He could tell the answer was lacking and left him open to more finger-wagging philosophy.

“Not exactly. The truth is, you probably weren’t even thinking about the cup, right?”

Gradie nodded.

“So, I remembered the cup having the pattern of the one cat and cat accessories—” Sam snorted. “—and I did this consistently, meaning I held the memory of that pattern in my mind as if it really was my memory, and the Hardworlds made it so.”

“How?”

“You could say they put us in a universe where everything was the same, except for now the cup had that pattern on it.”

Gradie looked at Lindsey.

“How is that different from the Mandala effect?”

She leaned her head on her hand and smiled at him.

“Do you remember the cup being a different pattern?” He felt she was drawing him into a trap, but trying to walk out of it would just give her more satisfaction.

“Yeah.”

“Do you?”

Gradie caught the second yeah in his mouth. Sam jiggled her cup with a smile, and he tried to remember what it had looked like before, but couldn’t imagine it with any other pattern. He made a face that Lindsey caught.

“You wanna know what pattern it used to have?” She was practically laughing at him.

“Alright.”

“It was different colored cats, no fish bones or anything, just cats.”

Gradie looked back at the cup and tried to remember it with a different pattern, but instead, saw it in Sam’s hand as she walked out of the kitchen five minutes ago, with the same pattern of a cat and cat accessories.

“What the fuck.”

“You don’t remember,” Michael said. “Because your self was always in this Hardworld, and you’re relying on his memories. Memory is malleable here. You have to know how to move it, and how to preserve it, when necessary.”

Gradie hardly heard him and didn’t understand at all. He kept looking at the cup, thinking of a pattern with multiple cats. It came to him, but not as a memory. He saw Sam holding the cup, saw the tabby and grey next to the calico, but it felt like déjà vu, like he was remembering a dream. A cold fear slid up his spine and stroked his brain.

I could dissolve in this place. Even my memories aren’t safe.

“Don’t try too hard right now, and don’t worry,” Michael said. “It’s a skill that will come to you with time as your Spirit grows.”

“My Spirit?” He remembered Michael mentioning his Spirit in that other world, but the meaning was hazy.

“The real you,” Michael reminded him. “The you in the Otherworld. It’s your anchor in the Hardworlds. You have to separate your Spirit from the self’s you inhabit to take control of them. It’s your Spirit that will push memory.”

“Which means—” Gradie scowled at his coffee and held one finger up, trying to put the pieces together. Michael helped him.

“When you drop into a Self, his past isn’t set in stone. In the Hardworlds, you’re connected to a near-infinite number of yous. Pushing memory is how you decide which version of yourself you’re in.”

“So, I can change the past?”

“No. You can only push a memory that fits within the causal chain, meaning something that still resulted in the present circumstances.”

“How do I know if it will fit? Doesn’t every small thing change everything, like the butterfly effect?”

Michael took a breath and formed his mouth into the start of a word, but Philip cut him off.

“Take everything you think you learned about this shit from movies, TV, fucking memes, and get rid of it. That shit will waste our time and get you killed. You know nothing, understand, until you learn it from us.” He finished his drink and stepped into the kitchen.

“The Hardworlds take the path of least resistance,” said Michael. “It’s a concept you will hear repeated and see proved many times before you understand it completely. They want to change as little as possible.”

“Want?” Gradie said, before he could stop himself.

“Jesus,” Philip said from the fridge.

“Like water wants to find the lowest point,” E.P. said, in a tone that implied Gradie might find that concept difficult to grasp.

“Oh, right.”

“Pushing memory is arguably the most important aspect of Hardworlding,” Michael continued. “Without it, there are no Hardworlders. But pushing memory while in the Hardworlds is difficult even for experienced operators, which is why it mostly happens before you even enter them. Remember in the fragment when I told you to try to remember your real life?”

“Yeah.” That hotel room, the hallways, the woman with the neon eyes. Once again, hearing someone talk about his dreams in real life was unsettling.

“If you can visualize the self you want to drop into, you can control your past. More importantly, you can control your abilities. Hardworlders do it to ensure they drop in with combat training, funds, connections. Anything they need to complete their job.”

Gradie thought about how much of a struggle it had been just to wake up in a Hardworld in the first place. It seemed a monumental task to do so with any kind of control. In fact, everything Michael had said since he sat down seemed like it would never be anything more than theory to him. That fear of not having what it takes slithered up again and laid its dead weight on his tongue. Michael must have sensed it.

“I’m introducing you to concepts I don’t expect you to completely comprehend right now, but I need you to be aware of them. Eventually, they’ll be second nature.”

Michael’s words did nothing to the fear, now radiating in his skull, that he had fallen into something not meant for him. He went to drink more coffee, but his cup was empty, so he studied the design, blooming purple irises, and tried to commit it to memory.